The best books about the politics of controversial statues
This article was originally published by Book DNA, a book discovery website where authors and experts share their favourite books. BISA has a partnership with Book DNA to showcase our members' books and this time it's the turn of Rahul Rao. Look out for further articles by BISA members in the coming weeks. Try their bookshelf on international relations or politics to browse a wide range of recommended books.
Why am I passionate about this?
As a queer person from a once-colonized country, I have long had an interest in struggles for emancipation and liberation. My scholarly work has been invested in understanding how structures of oppression sediment over time, and how time itself can be less than straightforward. The time we call the present is haunted by the past but also by anticipations of the future. My work explores how this temporal slipperiness makes itself felt in contemporary struggles around nation, gender, sexuality, race, and caste. As a scholar of international politics, I am interested in how yearnings for freedom manifest in different places and look to each other for inspiration and solidarity.
I wrote...
The Psychic Lives of Statues
By Rahul Rao
What is my book about?
In recent years, statues have become lightning rods in struggles over racial justice. Statues of figures associated with slavery, colonialism, and racism have been attacked and sometimes toppled, antagonizing those with a racial or other attachment to them. At the same time, statues continue to be built on monumental scales as a way of memorializing historical figures and events.
My book tries to make sense of these dual phenomena. It asks why statues have become a terrain for both the assertion and contestation of racial and caste supremacy. Journeying through places as far flung as South Africa, the UK, US, Ghana, India, and Australia, it explores how battles over statues have become ways of reckoning with the injustices of the past and present.
The books I picked & why
#RhodesMustFall
Why did I love this book?
This book is an intensive examination of "Rhodes Must Fall" – a student-led movement that erupted in South Africa in 2015 to protest the persistence of the legacies of apartheid more than two decades after its formal end.
The movement called for the removal of a statue of settler colonist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town as a metaphor for the dismantling of these legacies.
I love the book because while it is written in solidarity with the movement’s aim to dismantle white supremacy, it is also deeply attentive to how easily a politics of decolonisation can be misdirected at other marginalised groups – in this case, Black migrants from outside South Africa, who have frequently been at the receiving end of xenophobic violence.
Iconoclasm
Why did I love this book?
Written by a world-leading authority on iconoclasm, this book is a veritable encyclopedia!
I love its historical sweep, covering iconoclasm from ancient Rome to the present day. The book also ranges widely across geographies, including Europe, West Asia, South Africa, and the United States. In doing so, it makes clear how, rather than being characteristic of particular cultures, iconoclasm is rooted in the human psyche.
It helped me to understand how human beings can experience the inert matter of statues and images as coming alive, to the point where they are spooked enough to want to destroy them.
Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments
Why did I love this book?
This book tells the story of when, why, and by whom Confederate monuments were erected in the United States.
I love its careful attention to race and class, which helps us to understand how this process consolidated white supremacy but also undermined a revolutionary working-class politics. There is a terrific chapter on Stone Mountain in Georgia, which has been described as "the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world."
The historical context provided by the book helped me to make sense of what was at stake in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and in the white supremacist backlash to it that we are currently living through. Most memorable sentence: "Shuffling statues around our cities is like moving an abusive priest to another parish."
Gods in the Time of Democracy
Why did I love this book?
In contrast to stories of statue toppling that we encounter in the West in recent years, India has witnessed a frenzy of statue building of political and religious figures over several decades.
This book is the most theoretically sophisticated account of this phenomenon. It situates statue-building in India in its historical and political context, developing an account of "iconopraxis" – the use of icons to assert and consolidate community identity and presence in the public sphere.
I love Jain’s attention to the material lives of statues, which she elucidates through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors. The book wonderfully complicates the distinction between the religious and the secular, demonstrating how this is blurred in India’s many monumental statue assemblages.
Monumental Disruptions
Why did I love this book?
From the title of this book about "so-called Australia," it’s clear that we are going to hear a deeply subversive account of the politics and history of that country from an Aboriginal perspective.
In addition to providing a powerful critique of colonial narratives about white settler "discovery" that remain dominant in Australian public culture, the authors curate a rich archive of Aboriginal disruption of those narratives.
These have taken the form of not only statue protests of the kind that we have seen in other parts of the world, but also art, music, films, mock ethnographic documentaries, counter-memorials, and more. The book shows how another history of the continent has always been narrated, even if settler audiences have lacked the literacy necessary to understand it.
Photo by Eugenia Pan'kiv on Unsplash
